The MonetDB team at CWI/MonetDB BV are pleased to announce the new "May2009" feature release of the MonetDB suite of programs. This is a feature release, however it is is (mostly) backward compatible with the previous releases (Nov2008 and Feb2009). The two slight incompatibilities are: - The way string data is stored was changed for 64-bit architectures with 32-bit OIDs. There is however an automatic conversion on startup of the server. The biggest problem is, you can't go back to an older version once the new version has run. This incompatibility affects only the Windows 64 bit build (the other 64 bit builds use 64-bit OIDs). - The default location of the write-ahead log (WAL) has changed. This is relevant for both MonetDB5/SQL and MonetDB4/XQuery on all platforms. When the server first starts on an existing database, it will notice that the WAL is missing and will refuse to continue with a message which indicates where the WAL is now expected. You can either use a command line option to tell the server where the WAL is, or you can manually move the WAL to the new location. This latter option is done automatically on Windows when you use the Start menu to start the server. More information on the new release (and the above mentioned incompatibilities) is available at http://monetdb.cwi.nl/projects/monetdb/Development/Releases/May2009/. The sources and binaries are available at http://monetdb.cwi.nl/projects/monetdb/Download/. -- Sjoerd Mullender